Minor league baseball probably cutting 40 teams. In this plan each MLB team would only have 4 minor league teams. The teams that are cut could still play as independent teams. They would keep AAA , AA, and high and low A teams. Rookie league and Florida summer league would have to go independent or fold. My area has AAA and A teams so it won’t impact me.
Sources: Minor League Baseball Ready To Agree To Significant Reduction In Teams
I support it, many won’t.
This isn’t the 1950’s. It’s much easier to scout. If a 14 year old kid in Mongolia has a good arm, scouts will have endless footage of him from every angle they can pull up on their iPad. No one is getting off a bus and being sent to some minor league club to prove themselves just because a scout likes the look of their fastball after 5 minutes.
This will allow the clubs to pay minor league players more and have fewer guys hanging around who have no shot t the big leagues, but you’ve got to get 9 men on the field.
I’m not sure if this is the right move but they need to do something.
I’d like to see college baseball improve. It’s the only one of the big three that doesn’t have people saying “I like college competition better” Plenty of people prefer college football to NFL. Plenty of people prefer college basketball to NFL. But it’s not even close for college baseball. Why can’t baseball have a college system like basketball?
It does have a system, it’s just that no one cares.
Baseball had a professional minor league system before the NFL and NBA existed - it wasn’t wholly subordinate to the majors back then like it is now, but it was there. Cities that weren’t represented by major league teams all had professional teams of one sort or another. Consequently, it’s been the case basically forever that player development below the majors has been in the minors. College football and basketball basically ARE the minors for those sports. In baseball, college is clearly below the minors - it’s more equivalent to, say, third rate college sports, and always has been.
Triple-A baseball is exceptional; only an experienced eye can tell the difference between that baseball and major league ball (well, it’s easy to see the stadium is smaller.) Double A is pretty close to that. Long season single A ball is roughly equivalent to really good Division 1A college ball programs (I stress roughly; they are run and managed differently, and are better or worse than each other in different ways.) It’s just so many runs below the majors that it’s really hard to think how it’d ever reach the heights of popularity of NCAA hoops or football.
Too, this is part of why there’s as many minor leagues teams as there are; they’ve just always been around. dalej42 points out that it’s doubtful MLB really needs them all to develop an adequate supply of major leagues, and I suspect he’s right and I believe I came up with a similar theory in another thread, but maybe if there are fewer unaffiliated minor league teams, there will be more room for college baseball.
College sports in general (not football or basketball) are in decline. They are shedding teams. I can’t see them investing in a sport that few care to watch or support.
If baseball as an entity were designing a minor league system from scratch, it probably wouldn’t look the way it does now, dalej42 is right about that. Keeping all the players at one location, minimizing travel, signing only those players who would seem to have a shot–all of that makes sense.
That being said, I do think shedding existing teams is unfortunate for a number of reasons. I’ll mention one here, which is kids. Over the last 5-6 years I’ve been to oh, about 5-6 major league games in 4-5 major league stadiums. It’s been striking to me how few children and young teenagers there are in the park at these games. I live within a dozen miles of a short-season team (which at the moment anyway is not scheduled for contraction), and have attended probably 30 games in that same period of time there and in a couple of other minor league ballparks, and these games are crawling with kids. The difference is really striking. I went to a Mets game with a reasonably good attendance a few years back, and I bet there were about as many kids in all of Citi Field that day as there are in my local 5,000±seat park for most of the games I’ve attended. No, they’re not hanging on every pitch, but they are learning to associate baseball with fun. Baseball already has trouble appealing to younger fans, and this just seems like a dumb move in that regard.
The strike and then the steroids and now the sign stealing, all of those cost the sport fans many of whom never came back. They just can’t keep from stepping on their own dicks.
This is a problem with all major sports. High ticket prices makes it unattractive to bring kids. I’ve been to a few Maple Leafs games and it’s not that I saw few kids; I saw almost none. At one games I saw a handful; at another I saw no kids at all. There are very few kids at Raptors games.
Pro sports had flat attendance before COVID-19. It will not get better anytime soon.
I have Packers season tickets, and though I don’t go to many games anymore, I agree with this observation. Games I’ve attended in the past decade or so have had very few kids. My tickets for this year (assuming that any games actually get played in front of fans) are $149 each, and while they’re good seats, they aren’t amazing seats (22 yard line, row 36).
no, instead you have people me included that says the true spirit of baseball is the minor leagues.
if they have to shrink teams I think they should do it by attendance records cut one or two of the non-preforming leagues that should help
the problem is baseball developed in reverse in regards to everything else the pro sport came before the colleges started playing unlike football and basketball which was developed in schools for teenagers and even then getting drafted out of college wasn’t all that impressive until the 60s and 70s the pro leagues came second before college
with MLB most of the players were recruited off the streets and slums so the college game never developed… what I’m wondering whats gonna happen to the 300 or more players whos gonna be well jobless with no where to play ?
There used to be a lot more minor league teams than now. For example in the late 40s NC had 40 minor teams. Of course there was no TV then for most people. Now we have around 12 teams here in NC.
A lot of guys get to AAA and never reach the majors or just a short stint in the majors. Some of them are happy to stay in AAA for a while. Others realize they are not making the majors and find another career path. I met a guy once who was a pitcher and his MLB career was 2 games. He was 1-1.
I really don’t want college to become a minor league of semi-professional baseball. I think college sports is a sick and corrupt system that needs to be fundamentally changed, if not killed outright. Professional minor leagues are where player development ought to be for all professional sports.
What I’d like to see is more independence from the major leagues, especially in the largest minor league cities. We need economic competition, not more cartel.
More college players are drafted now than 10 or 20 years ago. Billy Beane of Moneyball fame has always been big on drafting college players. You get to see a kid play at 21 or 22 rather than 18.
I am confused by the numbers being bandied about in the article. It said that they are trying to cut to 120 teams from 160. But I think there are far more affiliate teams than 160. I support the Pirates and they have nine minor league teams.
Yeah, they said that the short-season and rookie league teams would have to become independent (so not cut) but that doesn’t change the fact that those teams are affiliated. It seems that the average MLB team has about eight affiliates. That means that the number is close to 240 MiLB affiliated teams.
Does that mean the plan is to cut 40-42 and de-affiliate ~80
Yeah, they get to hand off the cost of development to someone else. Eff that.
The teams that are rookie league and short season A could still exist but won’t be formally affiliated with major league teams. Any teams that are AAA, AA, or high and low A won’t be cut. It could be more than 40 teams are cut.
Most rookie league teams don’t sell tickets or generate revenue, so they can’t be independent. The GCL and Arizona League are all purely developmental camps for their major league teams.
Well, they can start charging and see if they can make a go of it.
There isn’t a “they,” MLB owns them and they have reasons not to charge for tickets. These are not the teams being suggested for abandonment (I mean, maybe they’ll cut down on Rookie teams, but these aren’t the 160 teams wondering about their future.)
Just to clarify things a little for those who aren;t sure: The minor league system looks like this, right now:
AAA. Each MLB team has one triple-A affiliate in either the Pacific Coast league or International league.
AA. each ML team has one double-A affiliate in the Eastern, Texas, or Southern Leagues.
A: each MLB team has one affiliate in the three so-called “fast” or “advanced” A leagues–Carolina, California, Fla. State.
A again: each team has one affiliate in the Midwest or South Atlantic leagues.
Then there are two “short-season A leagues,” the NY-Penn and the Northwest, but there aren;t enough teams in these leagues for every MLB affiliate to have one.
Below that there’s what nobody calls the “advanced rookie leagues,” the Pioneer and Appalachian, both short-season leagues as well. Again, there aren’t enough for every MLB team to have one, but every team has at least one team spread out over these two short-season levels. Some have two.
Below that are the other rookie leagues, the Gulf Coast, the Arizona. These are the ones RickJay is referring to, which focus very heavily on development. They don’t sell tickets to their games, don’t really have fans, don’t get writeups in the local papers. They are for the youngest, newest players. The other rookie leagues (Appalachian/Pioneer) do sell tickets, rely on ticket sales, have fireworks nights, may even have radio broadcasts: their attendance doesn’t tend to be great and their towns are often (not always) tiny, but they do have fans.
Right now there are about 160 teams in groups 1-6. The current proposal is basically to eliminate all the leagues in groups 5 and 6, bringing the number of teams down to 120–one affiliate per team in the top four groups, but leaving the developmental leagues in place. Note that while no one knows exactly which teams are going to be eliminated if this plan comes to pass, the original proposal didn;t simply wipe out all the 40 or so teams in the short-season fan-based leagues. Some full-season A and even a handful of AA teams were slated to be eliminated, with 10 or so short-season teams remaining in the mix and some reshuffling of leagues going on to make that happen. It’s not at all clear that the original list is going to be adhered to, especially with the uncertainties brought about by coronavirus.
Anyway, that’s roughly the scoop. Hope this is helpful in filling in a few of the blanks.